Google releases new developer and beta versions of Chrome

Keeping up with its breakneck development pace Google released new versions of Chrome yesterday for beta testers and developers. The beta release officially hit version 10, bringing a notable speed boost of 66% on the V8 benchmark suite over the current stable release, while also incorporating an early implementation of GOU-accelerated video decoding, which on supported video cards can reduce CPU usage five times when viewing full screen video.

Aside from improvements to JavaScript and video playback, Google has also revamped the settings interface, which now appears in a tab as opposed to a dialog box and includes a handy search feature you can use in case you're not sure where to find a particular option. Just enter a keyword, like "password" for example, and Chrome will display anything related while making the options directly available from the search results.

Google also made some security improvements, with a new mechanism for disabling outdated plugins, and introduced additional password syncing features that allow users to synchronize saved passwords across multiple computers and have them encrypted with a secret passphrase.

Meanwhile, those in the developer channel received the first preview of version 11, which offers enhancements such as a new implementation of the XSS Auditor to assist web authors in finding code segments that are vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. Google isn't talking much yet about its plans for Chrome 11, but according to Cnet, one interesting feature on the way is the so-called chromoting that will allow users to control "legacy PC applications" running on other computers. The feature is expected to work like a remote desktop application only from the browser itself.